Fictionista LISETTE GARCIA is a former journalist, Tupperware lady and U.S. Marine. Reach her via ligarcia@yahoo.com.

                                                              blind spot

                                                                for p.m.


A shaky Mexican doctor punched a hole in Evelina's optic nerve, piercing her vision like a small-caliber bores through a pawn shop window. In deadening nerves for surgery, the incompetent professional had rendered a speck of Evelina's world invisible.

The blank space went with Evelina everywhere and drove her berserk at first. She blinked incessantly, as if to wipe away the filament, dustball, sweater-fluff clinging to her line of sight. She wiped and rubbed a lot in those early days, too.

At last, however, after much slow-breathing yoga (heavy lifting forbidden on account of her original retina condition) the Brownsville-native made peace with her softened figure and damaged perspective. She took to caressing the orb with her eyelid, closing it ever-so-slowly, to see at what point her natural eyeshade patched the disturbing gap. One quarter? Half-mast? Three-fourths? Where exactly did skin devour hole?

Although pretty, Evelina was not one given to staring in mirrors. Nonetheless, in light of her new mission, she began peeking at the rearview often: studying her faulty peeper during red traffic lights or amid bottleneck lulls. She can hardly be blamed, then, for inadvertently seducing Rosario, the grocer who sweeps the front stoop along what used to be the slow-breathing, slow-winking girl’s drive home from work.

"Don’t fall in love. She can’t see you," neighbors advised. Their warnings fell on deaf ears: Rosario had had his own ill-fated encounter with an over-the-border healer and couldn’t hear.

Evelina died Saturday in a 10-car pileup on Texas Interstate 77. Rosario was crushed, and likely will not recover from the loss of the bedroom eyes he swears used to bat at him from a rusty green Impala every weekday afternoon.

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© 2002 Lisette García